Ides Kihlen was born in Santa Fe, Argentina in July 1917. Painting and music were passions in her youth and after moving to Buenos Aires, she enrolled at the National School of Decorative Arts, giving rein to a vocation that she still actively pursues at ninety-nine.

For more than a decade, she studied under Vicente Puig, followed by Emilio Pettoruti, André Lhote in Paris, and Battle Planas, who was highly influential in her work. The process was an eloquent expression of her personality. Ides Kihlen decided, before anything else, to be true to her own internal pace. For long stretches of time, she was more interested in the production of art than in obtaining results. She never considered herself a professional artist and often destroyed her work, often never bothering to title or date her paintings.

The witnesses to this process were her professors, her companions in the different studios, artist Adolfo Nigro, to whom she showed her early abstract work in the 1980s, and, of course, her two daughters and her granddaughter.

Ides has exhibited her work throughout South America, Europe and the US.